On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 1

27Mar

I recently got a copy of 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. It’s not really a very good book, for reasons that are interesting on their own and that I hope to talk about in another post very soon. Right now, though, I want to talk about the very first entry in the book, on The Oregon Trail, because that entry sent me down a rabbit hole from which I have only just emerged, blinking and reconsidering the history of interactive narrative.

If you’re of a certain age and nationality (i.e., mine), you almost certainly know The Oregon Trail. From the early 1980s until well into the 1990s virtually every public school in America seemed to have at least a few Apple IIs off in a corner somewhere, and one of the titles available on them was guaranteed to be this little educational game which placed the player in the role of a would-be settler setting off from Missouri on the long journey to the Oregon Territory. Those versions communicated mostly in text, but they spiced up their presentation with lots of colorful graphics, and were appealing enough to become favorites among students then and to still be nostalgically remembered by millions today. In fact, I just learned that there is now a Facebook app of the game.

What’s not often realized is that even when it first arrived on the Apple II The Oregon Trail was already a very old game. That’s why it’s the first entry in the chronologically arranged 1001 Video Games. (Actually, the fact that they got this date right is kind of surprising, because there are a heck of a lot of others that they got wrong. But I promised not to kvetch about the book right now…) It was in fact first written in 1971 by three educators at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann — no relation to the “Burger Bill” Heineman who worked on The Bard’s Tale series among other games — and Paul Dillenberger wrote the game in BASIC on an HP-2100 series minicomputer.

When I was writing my history of IF, I named two programs as the most important predecessors to the landmark Adventure (1976-77): Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza (1966), which first deployed the basic system of IF interaction (albeit in the context of an elaborate parlor trick rather than a game) and Gregory Yob’s Hunt the Wumpus, a simple game in which the player moves from room to room in a maze while attempting to avoid and eventually kill the eponymous Wumpus. The Oregon Trail makes me think that there should be a third entry on that list.

Let’s consider the state, such as it was, of interactive narrative in 1971. While there had been experiments with interactive storytelling before in the mystery genre, examples of the form were pretty thin on the ground. Edward Packard had already tried to get the first of what would become the Choose Your Own Adventure line of books published, but had been rejected by every publisher he had turned to, and would have to wait years more to see his idea in print. A group of scruffy wargamers in Wisconsin were toying around with the systems that would become Dungeons and Dragons, but, again, their work was years from publication. Wargames and other simulation games certainly had an experiential component, implicitly inviting their players to imagine the events they simulated unfolding in their imagination, but said events unfolded from the perspective of a god on high rather than that of an individual player in storyworld. In the world of computers, there was some ongoing work into computer-generated narrative among artificial intelligence researchers, but these were not really interactive narrative, but rather self-contained stories that the computer generated beforehand based on a set of input data and played out for an audience.

Yet The Oregon Trail opens by telling us, “Your family of five will cover the 2040 mile Oregon Trail in 5-6 months – if you make it alive. You had saved $900 to spend for the trip, and you’ve just paid $200 for a wagon.” It’s dropping us into a storyworld, and inviting us to take a role there and decide what happens next. Was there a computer program before this that so obviously wanted to make a story with (as opposed to for) us? I don’t know of it if there was.

So, I set off on a quixotic quest to experience The Oregon Trail in as close to its original form as I could manage. More on that next time.

Well, it does appear that the version of The Oregon Trail I set out to find may not exist anymore. But that’s getting ahead of things, isn’t it? As far as this stuff giving meaning to my life… well, let’s just not go there. :)

FWIW, there’s a good interview with one of the Oregon Trail creators in Kill Screen magazine’s “Back to School” issue from a few months ago. I don’t know if it would contain information you haven’t dug up already, but it was where I first learned a lot of this myself.

I am guessing you may have already found this, but the closest version available I’ve found mentioned here is a BASIC port from Creative Computing. (Not Westward Ho! which is a modified version in one of the Ahl books.) I haven’t tried compiling it yet but it looks fairly standard.

It’s all pretty standard BASIC — except for the “action sequence” that is dependent on the speed with which the player can type the word “BANG.” That will likely need to be customized for each BASIC implementation.

Oh, and there’s lots of little typos in the code, presumably a result of OCR scanning. Stick around a bit, and I should have a corrected version to offer.

I personally think the older versions had greater pure entertainment value to them as they were on and done in about 10 minutes even on old teletypes. Of course the complexity of the programs were minimal and really up to the individual porting the program to make it more complex or interesting.

The 1984 MECC Version of The Oregon Trail is in reality a bit video game and a bit education but the complexity of it and the effect decisions made within the game are what made it memorable.

Jimmy, thanks as always for a great article. I’m re-reading some of the Hall of Fame posts and I’m interested the video game book in your very first sentence. Do you have any suggestions on further reading (aside from your very robust blog)?

You’ve mentioned some other books in other entries as sources like Levy’s “Hackers” for very detailed histories, and I really enjoy the further reading (I got quite into reading about the oral history golden hare from Masquerade). I was wondering if there were any very general books like the ‘1,001 Video Games’ book that you really actually do recommend.

The general state of videogame histories is slowly getting better, but still has a long way to go. As far as very general histories, High Score! by Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson is quite good. It’s the book that I would recommend to someone who knows absolutely nothing about video- and computer games. While I’m not generally hugely enamored with the cataloging approach to videogame history, a *good* effort at cataloging that’s slightly more specific than 1,001 Videogames is Neil Tringham’s Science Fiction Video Games. David Craddock has written several worthy books which are more carefully written and edited than the norm for videogame books. Nick Montofort’s Twisty Little Passages is very good, as are all of the MIT Platform Studies books.

I have plenty of other bookish sources that I use, but few that I can really recommend as a pleasurable reading experience when it comes to videogame-specific books. (I hesitate to say “none,” because as soon as I do I’ll realize I’ve forgotten someone.) Most videogame books are pretty terrible, either too superficial like 1001 Video Games or just horribly written and edited, or both. I’m optimistic about the work that Alex Smith is doing, but have no idea when his proposed three-volume history of the games industry will emerge.

The Oregon Trail taught me that Dysentery and Eagles were the two biggest causes of death back then.

You should only play as the Farmer or the Carpenter if you want the game to actually be *fun*. If your only goal is to finally finish the game inside of a single 45-minute Grade 5 Social Studies class, you play as the banker, stock up on food and spare wagon-parts, run the oxen hard and overfeed the settlers, buy one new oxen for every two that die, pay to cross the river instead of fording, and *BOOM*, you’re in Oregon before the first snow.